The Tigresse of Csejte
by goldenmeadow
Summary: Hell's handmaiden met a Habsburg prince. Budapest 1806. A valnak, a Baroness, an inglorious beast. A palatine, a prince, the guillotine. Her heart dead, his rotting in aristocratic decay. Give up? Genuflect? Claim. One vampiress, one man. AU M collab.
1. Arousal and Abomination

**Huge adoration and incredible respect to my partner in crime and one of my very closest friends – winterstale (Jenn).**

Thanks to blondie aka robin for checking this all out with her very discerning eye and also for betaing this monster at the last minute! Lavish praise to ms_ambrosia for the fascinating banner, likewise created on short notice. Much love to Vanessarae who was unable to edit; hope you're feeling better, baby. Cheers to AngryBadgerGirl for song-searching and listening to late-night (sloshed?) ravings when she had much better stuff to be doing. As ever, this was written with the support of the very best women in fandom and beyond, the lovely (sick, wild, and weird) ladies of the DW.

We wrote this with the intention of entering the Cougar Revolution contest (hey, voting is now open on that one). However, the story grew to immense proportions, and we felt we couldn't cut it to fit the word limit guidelines. It's going to be a two chapter novella; we hope you enjoy the Tigresse as much as we've had a most interesting time writing her!

This is important, a ton of time was put into researching this little two-shot, so, although we took the liberty of messing with Habsburg royalty and some aspects of the Castle, market, etc., the settings, dress, language are as historically accurate as possible.

The song that inspired us for chapter one was _Summoning the Muse, _by Dead Can Dance.  
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~~Dedicated to one Miss Viola Cornuta, who kind of wants to strangle us right now for keeping her in the dark. We love you~~

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**The Tigresse of Csejte**  
**Chapter One: **_**Arousal **_**and Abomination**

_**Budai Vár**_**  
Buda Castle Parklands  
Budapest, Hungary, 1806**

_**Preface**_

At the age of thirty-six I was made over as this undying druid, a stone carved succubus. Swiftly, all my fleshly faults were erased, though the repudiation, the _exorcising_ of my soul, my heart, my very viscera, was not such a hasty working. Arduous, long-lasting, _inflammatory_, a fire built inside my veins and rippled like hot char into my tissue. To be burnished from within, _roasted,_ my host's body crippled in paroxysms, my throat eviscerated in endless screams. To wake from this magma a wholly replenished fantastical woman was paramount to dining on cherub's wings.

My skin was firm and unblemished, my pockmarks invisible, the scars of my tortured body blended into a porcelain carapace. I found not a looking glass, but a still, clear pond in which to inspect the visage that quirked back at me, questioning the Ottoman-dashed emblem eyes, the buttery locks laid to silken rest about my shoulders in flawless waves, lips curved snidely. All told, a cruelly beautiful disuse of a body quite familiar with punishment and ordeal.

Since that day, nothing had hurt me.

Except. _Except the flames crawling up into the back of my mouth and lighting upon my tongue!_

Thirst, unbearable thirst, only slightly eased by a scent, a bouquet of musk and male and potency.

I lowered my eyelids, sheathing my unresting orbs beneath feathery black lashes. Inhaling, deeply, I scrutinized the perfume wafting to me.

It was _him_.

Silently rising, needlessly brushing off my flawless white gown. Ornamented with lace petals set to bloom with gems of all spectrums, prisms glittered from my square, low bodice refracting the dappled sun in its wintery wink through verdant yew, linden, and poplar. Birds stilled and quieted. They understood a _tigresse_ when they saw one approaching.

_He_ did not.

Mute footsteps brought me too close.

_I just wanted to look at him._

The parklands became a claustrophobic maze enveloping me. On his territory, in his perimeter, I circumvented, watching him from all angles. _He_ was sniffing the air, just like me. Fanatically searching for something.

Of wide shoulders, majestic height, lithe hips, and so very young of age, this nobleman bore his physique with pride, and the expectations upon his head with fatigue. But I knew his reputation. If he wanted, he took. Sardonic, willful, temperamental, deliciously handsome and sensuous. Naughty, impertinent, bold.

I wanted _him._

Watching him stroll, gracefully padding his lands, stopping at a well-worn knobbly dead and fallen over chestnut trunk. Shaking dew from his copious crown, a thing made of tassels of the most rosy dawn, he pulled a skinned journal from his pocket and put nib to parchment.

Needing to see his sketch, his calligraphy, I stepped closer, so steeped on the viney tangle of his innate cologne. Only within his surrounds was I so unthinking as to give up my hiding place. _Starving nobility, strangling with expectations._

The snap-crunch of foliage shook through the dense fog of Budapest's billeting wintry sunrise. Frostily and slatey, the Danube wept a trail of frigid tears beyond the naked arms of the forest.

The twig cracked through the quiet, booming like thunder!

His regal head turned to my station.

Staunch prowess put his black-polished boot-shod feet in motion.

_Towards me._

Underbrush tangled like a thorny cane cage into the blooming hem of my gown, trying to halt my progress**.**

_  
_I ran. _Ran and ran_, serrated leaves wanting to cut a wily swathe into my bared cheeks and over my heaving breastbone, lashing against my loosely corseted bosom.

As if human again, I reached to my ankles and gathered my dress in both hands, pulling it high as my thighs, unheedful of revealing my legs to my pursuer.

I heard the grunts of his breath like sunrise dusting over me, getting closer, _closer_.

Flogs made of branches desired to encroach my flesh.

With widened, hunted eyes, gold like the dome of St. Stephen's Basilica, looking over my shoulder, halting to fumble with my hem maladroitly, I saw _him._

Not the iron maiden who'd chased me through such similar coppices, harnessing the force of Nemesis' phaeton – never promising me her sorority after two decades of decadent devilry and disgustingly dark dealings – she who had clawed me, and had supped from my veins, not to kill me, but to feed off me yet keep me alive. To return me to her turret where I'd been obliged to continue my servitude to her. _I was rebirthed in 1598, but not at the severing teeth of my lady._

This chasing tawny woodsman was the youngest, most pleasured, most handsome Prince of the Habsburgs. Agile and leonine, angry and broken from his inured gentrified boredom.

He was notorious for his antics.

What negligent, confrontational desire had brought me back here, again, was beyond my rationalizing. Cruelty, brutality, amour..._belonging?_

He rankled me.

**  
**So I dashed! Pitchforks, burnings, crucifixions...none of that martyrdom held a waxy candle to my need, now, to deviate this man.

_The one I wanted above all others._

_The one I couldn't have._

This attraction was insupportable. Ingrained in hatred, one more hex from my evil rancid mistress, for the Hapsburg throne -- she a Protestant Transylvanian aristocrat and me a common Saxony Transylvanian **--** I should have felt nothing for this princely young man. I _should have_ destroyed him without compunction.

He imagined he could catch me, that I was nothing more than a doe-eyed gazelle cavorting, _trespassing_, on his imperial land.

Shivering against the passion to turn and face him, I sprinted headlong through the raping fen, escaping my own demons, and the creature I could make of him.

_"__Megállás, asszonyom__!"_ he neither bellowed nor yelled, but his deep, normally disdainful, sensual voice demanded servility nonetheless.

_**  
**_I did stop, to laugh, to expel a force of wind from my lungs that knew not the pleasure of breath for its nourishment and livelihood. _Asszonyom, _Madame..._yes_! I was ages old, older than him, at any rate. Had I even been of human stock, I'd still be sixteen years his elder. As it was, my two hundred and forty-two years surpassed him heedlessly.

_I would call him boy, fiú._

Lips, like the rubies on his own crown awaiting him to take the throne, pulsing and full and luscious with fluid gushing thimbles of blood begged me to suck, to destroy him. His mouth parted as I stalled, half-crazed, hungry, wanton.

Eyes like laden fruit I'd never taste again made their fathomless way down my stayed breast to my cinched upper-waist, clapping to my near denuded legs as I still held up the frip and froth and frill of my gown.

As if appealing to a stray rabid cat, this Prince of Dalmatia held out his hand, palm to the ground before he lifted his calloused knuckles to my lips. _Did he know what danger he was putting himself in with this engorged bloody proximity?_

Denying to kiss his ring in fealty, I jumped back two paces, wary as a kitten at the scummy still water behind me.

_He should kiss my feet._

Now, standing apart, I observed deliriously when his glass-bottom eyes lasciviously wafted, and halted, at the luxurious material I still fisted about my upper thighs. The twinkle of gems echoed the deepening greenery of his look.

I motioned with my ankle, as if to fall into curtsy. Though I wouldn't, yet.

He ate over my flesh with his jade stare alone.

It was enough to set me on phosphorescent fire.

Lowering my underdress one layer at a time, I preened to the deepening furrow of his brow. My dress to my shoes, smoothing over my short Spencer jacket.

Fleet-footed, he edged towards me at the verge of the swampy pond, the one still holding a fairytale image of me in its depths. _Did he not know what I had in mind for him?_

Conceitedly, he pursed his fist to my mouth, _again,_ barely shielding the thin edge of my bite with his hard knuckles.

Fidelity was his price.

My kiss to his grand regality.

Begging my touch to his astonishingly arrogant stroke.

Like the demon I was, I sniffed and licked his skin, and finally curtsied.

Giving liege to his signet ring, regaled with topaz and garnets in the formation of his Habsburg crest.

_He_ should have bowed first. _Gőgös fiú!_

I was his elder.

His soon-to-be-mate.

I was..._válnak. _ Vampire.

And _he'd_ snared me.

_~~ll~~_

I'd been caught before, by a black widow, a virulent vixen, a Viscountess, a woman of clout, _my lady._

Her web extended a sticky maze across countries; Hungary, Austria, Transylvania. Capturing the innocent. Using me and my family to do her bidding.

Countess Elizabeth Báthory, _Báthory Erzsébet_, the Blood Countess, the Bloody Lady of Čachtice. She'd held my papers of human indenture. And she used them most unjustly.

The despicable actions she dealt upon my body, even more, the vile atrocities Countess Bathory perpetrated upon her short-lived victims, toying and demented, would always fracture me.

The stronghold of Csejte held our gynaeceum, the inner chamber, more a dungeon than a physician's practice. It was here I was forced to deliver highborn and peasant alike, to earn my keep and keep my own head above the bloody cesspool flooding the vault of Her Grace, the most horrific villainess.

Exquisitely manifested, malignant royalty, a lady, she was in the prime position to lure innocents into her inglorious fortress.

She and Mama, both widowed, were the perfect tandem of courtly manners and a serf's expediency. The Count was lost in one of our country's innumerable battles with the Turks; Papa at the shredding maws of the enormous and vicious Carpathian wolves. Their reputed stature said to be astounding, almost mythic, and with an icy and ruthless calculation about them. The vassals residing below Csejte in their peasant huts spoke of them as though they were not of this Earth: the very hounds of hell.

My mother bound us all, in our new destitution, to the Countess' service: Mama, her most trusted lady's maid, me naught but a girl-child when I came to her employ and, of course, my_ nagy testvér,_ _szeretett Teodor._ My older brother, darling Teodor, made even the netherworld to which our own dam lashed us - as mere children no less - an adventure: a tale to be laughed over while we hid under the profaned statue of St. Andrew in the unused chapel, sharing bits of stolen black bread. The Countess first saw him as merely brute force, good for little more than toiling in the stables, but once his affable smile, twinkling aquamarine eyes, and settling manner were observed by her, she set him to her own purposes as well.

Procurement.

Her bloodlust was scaling the most revolting of heights, and she required more than one agent afield to bring her new playthings.

Darling Teodor, as gentle of heart as he was imposing in form - _so much like Papa_ - would laugh and chuck my chin when I tried to tell him the fates of the girls he brought to work for the Countess.

"Work is hard for these spoiled girls from the country," he would say, the laughter rumbling through his broad chest.

He was too good at his travail, gave himself heartily too it, even after I'd warned him he must be capable, _yes_, and bring pretty girls to the castle but never too much. Never the most finely wrought in form, never the most charming and especially none to rival Her Grace's still steadfast beauty. She must know he performed his duties well...but never too well. She must not ever truly notice, for to be noticed was to be pressed - _literally_ - to her whims.

I choked on my own bile the afternoon I entered her chamber and found him in the old Count's chair with his feet on the rail by the fire. He held the same stone encrusted goblet we all had: her method was singular and precise, never deviating from a rigid progression of steps through her chamber to the mass graves below the foundation of Cjeste. I had sipped the almond-scented wine from that cup as a girl of thirteen and now at eighteen knew more of flesh - and the ruination of it - than my own brother of five-and-twenty.

Smiling broadly at me, his weather-worn skin glistened with sweat in the sweetly vaporous firelight. I was too late. My Teodor had drunk from the Count's goblet, surely feeling himself quite honored for the excellent dispatch of his duties.

"Teodicu, drink your wine," I said evenly.

He smiled again indulgently, casting my request aside with his usual bonhomie.

"In good time, _húg lány._"

Snorting softly, I pushed the wine at him again. It would be his only salvation from the torments awaiting him: Teodor _must_ be drunk and unaware from the wine of her imp-vintner before she took him up as her evening's entertainment. Once again I was utterly powerless to stop any of it, a mere cog in the workings of Her Grace's unholy machinations. My placid expression, exquisitely rendered from years of practice, concealed my sudden, frantic need to assure a foggy descent into the death awaiting him. I fought the urge to stamp my foot indignantly, thereby earning his dismissive 'little sister.'

_My own brother. My darling Teodicu._

Strand by strand, my heartstings snapped.

He would die tonight, sooner rather than later, and I would be wholly alone in this putrid sea of browning crimson.

"Please," I urged him with a new and wild urgency as I cast my eyes over my shoulder toward the Countess' bedchamber. "Please, dear Teodor. Drink..."

Relenting finally with a sigh and furrowed brow, he drained the cup, allowing me to replace his measure of the dastard liquid and then some. He was so big…_how much would he need?_ I tried to calculate, remembering the night my own Mama handed me the Count's goblet and told me tonelessly to drink. How much had I needed? Surely more than one cup, and my brother was so much larger.

Shuddering at the memory of Her Grace's first attentions to my body, I sloshed the wine over Teodor's hand. It spilled, thick and red, down his arm and onto the hearthrug. I gasped and fell to my knees, wiping at the stain with my hand-laundered skirt.

"_Baba lány_, you're nervous as a little kitten. What troubles you?" His hand rested gently under my chin, turning my darting eyes to his. "This is a good evening, sister. I've brought Her Grace a real Princess: a beautiful, willful girl who is in need of discipline and service to docile her boastful ways."

And she _would_ docile: Forever and most likely before moonrise with my own brother her bridegroom in death.

"Just drink, quickly. " Another and another, Saint Andrew _tessék_**…**please. Let me have him stupefied before she returns.

"You, girl."

Mama. _Her aide-de-camp._

"Madame?" I answered as I stood, my spine annealed at the sound of her voice.

"You are required in Her Grace's bedchamber."

_God help me, may I bear this in silence._ She will be most vengeful: a Princess _and_ pronounced as a beauty by Teodor.

"Drink another, two if you can manage." I pleaded softly to him, then followed the woman who bore me into this world to the very bedchamber of the Archfiend's consort.

She'd had her way with the unfortunate Princess. Several times, it appeared. The poor girl, likely close to my age, was gagged heavily under leather and wads of reeking cloth, bound to each corner of my Bloody Countess's workbench and already draining into the copper ewers. Her beautiful azure eyes searched weakly around the bedchamber, her tears a steady and useless brook meandering through the blood seeping from her cheeks and into her wheaten hair.

The Countess rarely maimed her girls' faces: she liked a pretty picture to look upon as she had her fill of them. The Princess had been ruined, as she had ruined me. A dark rivulet of blood ran from between her legs. My Lady had, then, it would appear, not been kind.

"Her Grace will require her bath, girl," Mama sniffed regally as if she were the Countess herself. "Be sure it is well-heated. There's a chill in the air."

Heating the copper basin she bathed in required pots and pots of boiling water, then five stout men from the stables to carry it upstairs, grunting and moaning all the while over their scalding hands.

As I exited through the antechamber, I heard the Countess' sneering simpering laughter marrying with good Teodor's own easy mirth. Ah, Blessed St. Andrew, he sounded a bit in his cups. She would be plying him with more of her special vintage and little bits of sweets.

_Please. Quick._

Impossible.

I had but one choice. My own safe haven rested in tiny grains within the locket my father purchased for me from an old cigány woman at a village festival for the feast day of Szent András so many years ago. I'd swept the potent powder into the case one evening after she'd dealt with an investigator sent by the Lutherans and was careless with the bottle of _Veninum Lupinum_ . The rod my mother administered to my hands and feet after the bottle was discovered tipped over on the Countess' rug was worth it. This drug was quick and someday, when Her Grace turned her glinting sanguine eyes on me, I would thwart her with my own speedy release.

Some time later as I paced, skittish and harping, directing the pustule-covered ever-sweltering scullery maids over their buckets of boiling water, I heard a single strangled cry, cut off awkwardly as it reached a crescendo.

It was done.

I turned my eyes aloft – as if heaven were still conceivable from the bowels of this Abaddon – and silently blessed the gentle soul of my beloved brother. His presence was the last scrap of light and love in my life. It fluttered away like a girl's ribbon on a strong gust of wind.

I opened her chamber doors, head down, and stood aside quickly to permit the grunting men admittance. Steam curled from the hand-wrought copper basin, bathing my cheeks and neck in fresh moisture. Inside, they set about staging the tub by the roaring hearth as I readied the heavy cloth meant to hold in the heat as long as possible. Her overwrought moans and sighs slithered from her bedchamber; her foulness had aroused her again and she was joined in congress a new, possibly even with my mother.

Behind me, a metallic clink drew my attention from my task. Slowly I turned, my movements suddenly ungovernable for my mind knew surely what I would behold.

There before me lay another of the Countess Bathory's grisly tableaux. My brother hung just above the Princess, their faces almost close enough for an embrace. He was suspended by crude iron chains and muzzled harshly with a barbed leather bit and collar. My senses swam at the thick cadence of his dripping blood. Fresh horror, the like I'd staunched my notice of years ago, flooded my conscience and I swallowed the retch of acidic fluid strangling my throat.

She had removed his hands and feet. The raw tissue and bone sitting proud of their stumps glittered in the candlelight.

He moved. Groaned heavily.

My hand went to my throat, clutching my locket.

"That is all. Away with you," I hissed at the men.

I sped to Teodor, wrenching the tin chain from my neck as I went to him. His eyes opened weakly and found mine, filling with glassy tears.

"Sorry, my _szeretett_. So... so sorry," I said between panicked gasps. "I have something to speed you. Quickly, Teodicu, you must swallow and keep it down.". My hands were trembling mightily. _How could I look upon him for another second?_

His face contorted and suddenly I realized why.

Unmerciful mistress! She had cut out his tongue.

I would give him his ease but there would be no words of parting for me.

I removed the bit, gently as possible from his abused lips and tipped the contents of the locket into his willing mouth. He tremored immediately and looked as though he might heave. I shook my head at him, glancing over my shoulder at the bedchamber door and then back to him beseechingly.

"Swallow, brother. _Please_. Try."

Somehow, he managed. I heard his dry throat clicking.

"The poison is quick, _szeretett._ I promise. I've kept it for my own end for years."

His head inclined to me slightly and he tried valiantly to speak. I shook my head savagely and replaced the bit as loosely as possible.

"This is what it is here, Teodicu. There is no safety for any of us. Go to Papa and pray I may join you both soon."

His body began to shake wildly, rattling the chains that suspended him like a marionette from a traveling actor's playwagon, then lurched in great spasms.

"Szeretett Teodicu, I love you, my dear brother," I whispered.

As his eyes met mine again and then fell shut, I believe he forgave me.

The last soft chink of his chains had been the death of my heart. Stonied, I'd turned and waited for my Lady, ready to be of whatever service she might have required.

_**Lehel Piachoz  
**_**Lehel Market  
**

A call through the confining dale cramped with our agitation and silent dispute had broken both my reverie and the Prince's scrutiny of me that morning within his castle's walls while I'd stood stationary at the edge of the pond. His attention held, minutely, elsewhere, I'd extricated myself from the arrow of his timbrous eyes. He'd blinked, and I'd disappeared amongst the muck of mud, hoarfrost, and snow that seethed to the colder touch of my limbs.

With effort, I'd remained apart, away from his citadel, his carnal wishes, his proud and pale and somehow _pleading_ pull that tugged me. A chain, like the one that had bound Teodor and myself alike to Her Grace, figuratively tying us in knots, literally chinking us to her revolting loathsome desires, constrained me to him.

I'd recoiled to recognize such want, such disintegration plaited with impurity and princely price. _Pride._

His sneer had made an operatic piece in my mind. Just one more curl of his lips, a softening, would be his magnificent mask when he made his formidable way inside my body.

Seven days had passed.

Not nearly the longest of my life, but my impatience rose higher than ever before.

I skirted aside the maleficent manifestation of my desire for him. I went on about my days, and nights. And yet more days.

One more…day.

Though it was January, and not quite midday, the sun cast its pleasantries over my form, cascading rays about me, creating an alluring and fetching sheen to my Limoges complexion. Strolling negligently, I held my finely laced fan in one hand, closed, and tossed a jojó up and down from my index finger to cobbles and back again, with my other. Didyme, my lady's maid, held herself with assured comportment behind me, offsetting my elegance with her puritanical robes, my indolence and insolence with her straight posture.

From Hosk tere, Heroe's Square, we ventured to Lehel Market, bypassing the arts musees of _Szpmvszeti Mzeum_ and _Mcsarnok_ with their Renaissance appeal meeting Byzantine architecture and onion domes. Where East met West, adjacent to the Danube. Warm vapors rising from underground hot springs swirled into the square through stone vents, wafting up my skirts, causing a rebellious trill inside my thighs. Having descried nearly all sense of decency, I was often a visitor to Gellrt Baths, to be handed but a small apron to cover my womanly parts as I walked from pool to spring and hot bubbling waterfall. Sluices of heated waters fingering over my denuded body begat as much delight as a sensual interlude with a human man.

Until this boy happened to come to my attentions.

Now there was sinful desire, an exigent twinging. Some intensely abyssal discomfort that wouldn't lessen without his presence.

_I should have killed the Habsburg herceg already._

Didyme and I entered the hub-bub of the market, she with her basket and me with my accoutrements befitting a lady.

Though I would never partake the breads, meats, fruits I occasioned to purchase, I slapped my brocade fan in the direction of items made to complete my act as a human woman. Imperiously I nodded to Didyme -- this pulpy nauseating fruit, that mealy-textured vegetable -- and she did my bidding with not a word from my mouth.

Though I held the gap in our status most dear, I treated her, at home, in my little palace, as a sister.

She would never be _my pet_.

Refusing to be defeated, deafened by the shrill crack of human hands, the slap of their feet, the high-pitched intonations of their voices, the rush of the crowds migrating to the best stalls, I stole a hand around the low oval shawl collar of my morning dress, touched the heavy rosy braids at my upper arms, the lacing criss-crossing between my breasts. The cameo at my neck was arranged to highlight my deep and lovely cleavage. I was utterly cold to the touch.

Fearlessly, I opened my fan, the billows from the underground sulfurs unsettling me.

Not nearly as much as the vision almost on top of me!

Time stood still on its heels. Teetering and waiting to topple me over.

Handsome in his bearing.

Hedonistic in his hungry wandering over my gown which emphasized my slim waist, my womanly hips, my charming décolletage.

Unparalleled in his winking glean and half smile as he took in my festooned hat, a tall confection atop the squalls of butterscotch curls flowing down my back.

Recognition curdled with haughtiness, heightening the color on his razor-clean cheeks. The beat of my breaths tapered out like my pulse had long ago, a clinching in my stomach filled with need raided over the inferno of bloodlust lapping heatedly up my throat.

His attire was entirely in keeping with his eminence; a long-tailed coat with a short front, opened over an equally abridged vest. A blossom of creamy ruffles in a lackadaisical horse collar knot reprised the breadth of his strong throat, his own respirations chopped like a berg to water. I wanted to stitch my fingers to the broad lapels of his dove gray jacket, find home in the notches of that collar, and I looked, decidedly, at his tight trousers, up his calves and thighs to the most tempting institution of fashion this day and age. His fall-front breeches in resplendent blue, their pockets astride his hips were nothing more than open gaps leading to his member. Eyeing the warp and strain of cloth across that barely buttoned frontispiece, I imagined my hands waltzing inside.

By reputation he was well-endowed. By this, my second sight of him, I understood the gossip to be truth.

Clothed as he should be, he managed to appear absolutely..._wicked._

I fanned faster.

Didyme closed my parasol and held my minor train aloft.

The palatine laughed boldly up to the sky! His guarde widened their keep as he strode closer. The entourage a monument to masculinity and heirs of this time just as he was.

I felt the shiver from my corpse stagnate as my young lady rustled my underskirt to proper shape, appeasing me, hoping to distract me.

A drop of sweat sweetened down from behind his ear, sat upon the lobe.

Jerking my gown from Didyme's brown hands, I stepped closer.

He stooped.

The tear of salt dropped.

I reached out a finger, plucking it from air.

Coyly, I held it aloft to him, that wobbling bubble on my fingertip. When his tongue drew out in a pattern on the whorled air, I recoiled, replenishing my thirst with nothing but a gambit of his essence, his perspiration. A pastiche of what was to come.

"_Mmmm,"_ I hummed over the pad of my finger, ingesting his taste, angling for more.

With a flick of his canonized copper head, he propelled the equally impressive man at his side to lean forward. The frown on that one's face, dimming his bright blue eyes, became unimportant next to the script on the square of linen he held out.

I was bewitched between slapping the well-bred man for having his underling -- still a prosperous figure in his own right -- greet me, and rising to his challenging glass-worked eyes. His thick eyebrows rose, understanding my battle.

_To accept or deny._

Without looking, I hooked the proffered invitation back to Didyme.

Subservience was hereditary, I found.

That thing I'd interred was now exhumed.

I gave the unbearably pompous palatine my card, forcefully, condescendingly, as if I did not care for his attention, nor if he called on me. Of my own hand, instead of demanding staid Didyme to do my bidding...to express we were equals. There was only one way I wished to be beneath him—and that he would know, from the look in my eyes and the brush of my breasts against his fully muscled upper arm as I slid the Roman letters into his palm.

More enchanted than I, he shot one hand about my waist while the other brought my announcement close to his face. In depthful deliciousness, his phrasing was flawless, "_Esmerelda Davrulia."_

The curve of his brow furrowed, "_Esme?"_

Inky stains beat my irises.

Sensual and forthright, this pasha seemed so familiar!

I turned, because I couldn't combat him.

I walked away, because it was the only way I could stop myself.

The ruche of lace at my wrists, the fat silk bow low at my back both guided his voyeuristic voyage to a stop above my derriere.

I made a mistake.

I stilled.

Crestfallen, craving, he prowled to me, just beside the merchant of Eastern spices.

Suddenly voluminous, my toppling skirts hobbled me.

Too near, too devastating, too toothsome, I nearly upended into his lap!

I was a pagan untouched by soul, _almost._

Breaking free of his steadying hands, I turned.

To the spires of Matthias Church, I ran.

Inside a niche, with crumbles of sculptured archangels pouring sandstone palisades over me, I traipsed over the beloved paper taken from my pocket, where Didy had secreted his announcement.

_Edouard Joseph Leopold, Archduke of Hungary._

Eschewing the unbearable primal longing to make him mine, this young man of rank and file, just coming into his prime while I would _always be in mine_; I was devastated. Incapacitated. Untamed, forsaken, untouched.._.he could break me once more._

Soft-shod, I entered the temple. An enclosure of snakeskin guarded by gargoyles.

A temptress, in hiding.

The ecumenical surrounds erased my past, made of me a tabula rasa.

Finding a chapel, to My Lady, I knelt and pontificated.

Begged and pleaded!

Dusty sparkles dazzled in an array of rubies, sapphires, onyx, diamonds.

Halos glistened.

My God would never listen to me again.

The flap of angel's wings belted me further to the prie dieu.

I'd been discarded.

_I had discredited._

In the cloisters of the temple, feeling a gathering of ill will settling about my bastardized soul, I shuddered beneath the foul weight of the Countess.

She haunted me. Leaping out of carved recesses, from the heights of parapets.

I alone had known the truth. A bloody queen she was. But she was no mere murderer of humans. She was the penultimate phantasmagorical creation..._a válnak._

Through servitude, abject obeisance, I'd gained my life.

For I had been her little pet. Her _kevés tigresse_.

_~~ll~~_

After foully, grievously exsanguinating and dismembering my dear brother Teodor, Her Grace had kept me as her heinous helpmeet though it seemed I could do no right by her. With each misstep, I had incurred her wrath and, as a wraith, she used my body like that of a slave girl instead of a servant. Violently, wielding a strength that bespoke of her unyielding existence, and a warped dreadfulness expressing her diminishing sanity, she wounded me with her talon-like fingernails, her viperish fangs, flaying my flesh, nibbling delightfully at my breasts and nipples, my stomach and upper thighs and often into the juncture between; causing festering incisions in and around my maidenhead where a man had never been, I feared never would be. Threshing me with her martinet, the scourge-like whip whose leather lashes were hardened by soap, even punishing me with the wooden handle, _inside my body_, when she was in just the right sadistic mood. Crowing gleefully to the sound of my screams entombed in the palace's thick stone walls, she had sipped from me and flagellated my skin only where it would never be seen by proper society. The scars inside of me were incorporeal, and never to be viewed by the eye not beholden to dreams and nightmares.

In all this anguish, I whispered silently, for death, for deliverance, for escape to my Lord and my brother. Deviously, Bathory kept me hanging on just enough to survive, to recuperate, to continue, to remain her tortured kevés tigresse when the whim fell upon her.

The adjudicates, the ministers, the authorities had been alerted. But only after one thousand and more deaths. Grisly trials of human gore never to be righted, laid to rest.

Under house arrest, I had been _allowed_ to serve her, still. Injustice! Could they not see the flail of flogs, the blazon of scars atop my emaciated arms when I'd lowered my shawl? I'd been only dedicated to her for my life, because she'd held my death in her fine-boned hands, like a noose she liked to gather tight if I appeared at all negligent, feisty, or disobedient!  
**  
**  
Even now, centuries between us, the number of times I'd caught the fetid stench of her overwhelmed my ability to quantify it. Likely a parcel of my soul would always be her prisoner, her presence had so dominated my human life, even as my Sire had taught me the pleasures of _this_ life. So many say we surrender our immortal spirit when changed; yet, after the wretched existence my own human mother had indentured me to, _this lif_e -- my supposed half-life -- had been the _ascension __from_ the nightmare. My Lady could no longer claim whole provenance over my body and mind. The slip of consciousness still unable to keep her fully at bay had been a small price to pay for the release from her governance granted by the beautiful cloaked being who'd descended as my own avenging angel into the Earthly Valley of Hinnon where I'd resided.

That they took me in under their protection and care was still inexplicable to me over two centuries later. No longer a gimcrack in an unending spectacle of horrors, they doted on me like the child I never was. Every amusement, any comfort, all manner of diversion their unending wealth could obtain, was mine simply for asking. Eventually, the opulence glutted me much as the asceticism of the Countess' lair left my psyche bone-dry. I made my way into the world on my own, with the blessing of my Sire.

For the first time in twinned existences, my life was truly my own to shepherd.

Was I fearless? Relieved? Frightened?

_Frightened._

Fretful and starving.

Wandering leagues, I'd risen through society.

A quick study, I certainly understood how a lady of consequence was to behave.

Remembering my pilfering, pickpocket brother -- his antics never forgotten -- I capitalized on my newborn coquette's ability to captivate those with open money-pieces, the way to a purse often found through the codpiece of breeches. I was choosy to a fault. I felt I deserved _something_ for my bargain with Lilith, the devil's wife. Young, ripe, honored by _my_ presence, _my_ regard, _my_ attention, these men were often of import...brothers, lovers, soldiers, sons; they would be missed. I tried so very hard not to kill them. Occasionally I triumphed over the insatiable huntress hissing inside of me.

Managing to survive, to, in fact, _thrive_, I had the sleeplessness of ages during which to consider that which I'd been short-shrifted: a husband, love, a family, safety, _a home_.

The dearth of normalcy was to be my codicil.

Becoming a woman of means had enabled me through class. Using my feminine wiles allowed me to line my bank accounts.

A meal of a man was squandered here or there.

I had a taste for masculine, derelict, delicious, blue blood.

I may have tasted a Hanover or two in my time.

_Erzsébet Bathory_ always followed me, sharp on my footfalls. Deriding my decisions, jeering me for the maid I used to be.

Sometimes my hands trembled, when I held the throat of a doe, or a man -- never a woman -- _just so._ As if she were scolding me for my imperfect form.

In her esteem, I always returned to savagery. _The tigresse of Csejte. _ Years folded into decades turning around centuries. I relinquished my pursuit for companionship. Mortals always died, I could hardly stomach my own kind, I'd killed more than I'd allowed to live and I was incapable of making a mate in my own image. Turning my back on knowing humanity, I became the undomesticated thing I was. Answering only the call of my body's twin excessive hungers.

_Until Edouard._

Here, now, the doors of my sanctum flung open. I had enough wits to spy the man who'd followed me. _His manservant._ His comrade. His brother? _No._ They didn't look the same. This one was of longer hair, almost olive-toned, an odd combination with the flaxen waves falling to his chin and his piercing falcon's eyes of cerulean blue. Edouard had called him Janos.

And Janos was searching for me.

On feet that made no noise over the aged tiled floors, within the ecclesiastical bastion of _Mátyás-templom_, I followed the knave to the altar, spying an escape. By way of a dank, little-used tunnel, I foraged through nightmarish dark and old souls, the cathedral's jeweled lights from the narrow rows of stained glass sanctioned off from this mine. A heavy, iron clasp released with a guttural whinge and delivered me out of the guts of the church of Queen Wicha del Aguila, into her buttresses, and from there to the teeming square, which hid me from further chase.

To the Danube, I hurried. Only upon reaching the edge of the water, did I stop. To ponder. _To cherish._ That he'd sent his man after me? _I was getting soft!_ He should have followed himself!

But his look, in the market...his square jaw tipping down to me, his clearly lined red-wine lips smoldering up, his glade-eyes shading into the darkness of a forest-toned boudoir. The jump in his cheek of a muscle clenched, and the wash of flush across those crests! Aquiline, his nose had ended with a widening of nostrils, tasting the air for me, as I did him.

The mess of wily hair upon his head echoed off the copper-tiled rooftops as he'd brought one wide, long hand back to massage a tension from his nape. His throat followed the wave of a hard swallow. I inhaled when his Adam's apple dipped and rose. And I made no mistake as I licked from one corner of my lips to the other, longingly inspecting the desirous bulge in his breeches.

He'd crumpled my card within his fist.

I'd curtsied, lowering my head to him...something I'd not done since I was in the nefarious employ of the Countess.

_This time I did it willingly._

No man in the Holy Roman Empire had garnered my favor thus.

_**Budai Vár**__** Vadászat**_

**Buda Palace Hunt**

Re-fashioning myself after one of the higher echelon of Transylvania, I'd passed my dossier around dutifully to the royal Habsburgs and their courtiers, their crones and cronies. A long list of regal aquaintances, many of whom I'd charmed faciley with my wit, ethereal grace, ingenious and insouciant cunning, my unsurpassed skills as a _madame_ made for man's body, in one form or another, had aided my arrival amongst the elite. It hadn't been difficult to inveigle an invitation to January's Grand Hunt at the castle.

I affected complacency at the introductions, though really I was bored. An imposing beauty in her own right, Elisabeth Amalia, Queen Consort of Hungary was Edouard's mother. Another _Erzsébet_to haunt me, goad me with her perfect offspring, dangling him like ripe fruit for a betrothal to salvage a guarantee with between the religious and dynastic fashions of Saxony and Roman Empire.

_N__ádorispán_ Edouard Alexander Leopold of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, the Palatine of Hungary was his father. A sheet of defeatism cloaked his former grandness.

There was one more, his sister, Alizka, the Serene Grand Duchess. I had yet to catch sight of her or Edouard the younger.

Baroness Esmerelda Davrulia**,** I was introduced to the gathered, fatuous, snobbish milieu.

With tawny cat's eyes for one man only.

Holding forth with pleasantries, a tight smile on my claret lips, unsaid insult curling my mouth, I swept past the balding pates, flouncing skirts, mildewy custard flesh of ignoble creatures who imagined themselves more patrician than I.

My hand kissed, my wrist stroked, my ire heated. My thirst unquenched, my sight starving, I finally found him in the stableyard.

Outfitted in _my_ own heraldry, I was attired like a little general in a black woolen greatcoat adorned with the golden raven, glittering golden soutache, boullion ropeing and four rows of gleaming gilded buttons. A little red fez perched jauntily atop my shimmering locks and was secured with a gilt ribbon Didyme had tied fetchingly at the curve of my jaw. My legs, round with compacted power were clad in my own perfectly tailored scarlet breeks; I would have no blushing maiden's chaste riding habit. Certainly, I drew appraisal now...and I knew there would private comment on the scandal later. And to that, what beast might I ride? My very appearance had set several to nervous whinnies and pawing at the frozen earth, clearly aware of the threatening presence now among their masters' and mistresses' ranks.

He was beside me in an instant.

"Baroness, what a singular pleasure." He all but purred as he raised my gloved hand to his lips.

"Yes, indeed." My eyes matched his in confirmation that it would be a most unique revel.

"Where is your mount? May I ride with you on the hunt?"

"I have none to speak of, " I replied mildly, examining the fine detail of my cuff. "And I have no affection for such beasts. I prefer to walk."

"In this weather? " He tossed back his head, laughing indulgently I was sure at an image of my small frame struggling through the waist-deep snow.

_It was no hindrance on my way to the stables._

"Come, then, Baroness. Might you accompany my dear sister, Alizka? She has been unwell of late but insists on coming out on the hunt."

"I'm sure her company will be most intoxicating."

He waited for the 'Sir' that still would not come. I smiled placidly at his simmering countenance, awaiting his challenge.

It also did not come.

Turning on his highly polished heel with a grunt, he stalked across the stable yard to a small sleigh. A racking cough came from within, sending a small plume of frozen breath into the air.

Once aside the sleigh he turned, expecting me to be behind him.

I smiled pleasantly, still in the spot of our original greeting.

He snorted, not unlike his own stallion, and stalked across the frozen cobbles.

"Baroness," he said through gritted teeth. "Would you be so kind?"

"Nothing would pleasure me more." I accepted his arm and we made our way to the sleigh.

"Alizka, _az én -m kicsi édes nővér_, may I present the Baroness Davrulia**."**

The words could still unsettle me: _my little sweet sister_.

Two hundred years of ache were automatically pushed aside as I leaned into the sleigh, smiling gaily. Within, wrapped in innumerable furs and blankets, was the smallest, palest creature I'd seen at court. Her ebony curls were piled high around her forehead in the latest fashion, topped with a bonnet made of the brightest emerald wool and embroidered with fanciful Maygar designs. Even as they betrayed a stubborn illness, her gray eyes sparked and danced with genuine enthusiasm.

"Oh Baroness! How delightful to finally make your acquaintance." She took my offered hand in her small one and squeezed our palms together in a surprising show of solidarity. " Are you wearing…? Oh, my how clever! A jaunty little uniform! It's the most delightful thing ever for a hunt, is it not, brother? How sensible of you, Baroness, to keep your legs from the cold! And is that your family hearaldry? How stunning, a golden raven! Isn't it stunning brother?" She drew in a wet gasp and began again. "Janos! _Fitalezred _Vitlok!"

Ah, Janos, the manservant!

Also, it would seem, the Junior Regimental Officer of Horse.

He turned from checking a saddle, expression softening from the hardened regimental officer who had chased me at Edouard's bidding to a doting young man, his sapphire eyes full of total adoration.

Might Edouard cast such a look at me?

_Why would I care?_

I adjusted my coat, suddenly feeling quite ridiculous in my attempt to turn my nose at Edouard and his retinue of admirers. Alizka and Janos were the two that mattered to Edouard; sadly for him, nothing occurred to them but each other.

I hurried to the other side of the sled and arranged myself under a fur or two, lest the Commander Vitlok see my ensemble.

"Sweeting, you should be indoors," he said, taking her hand and no note of me or Edouard.

"_Hmpf_. Janos, I need fresh air and activity and to be with you. Besides Ma-ma's physician applied the leeches this morning…"

I stared in horror as her voice trailed away.

Leeches.

_Weeping__ wounds._

I reached into my reticule and extracted a large linen handkerchief soaked regularly in lavender oil by Didyme for such purposes, pressing it delicately at my face against the coming assault.

The Grand Duchess was a delightful, charming girl, full of amusing stories and tender anecdotes about her dear Commander Vitlok.

She would be dead before spring.

The running sores left behind from numerous encounters with the leeches exposed the malady within. The illness was in her blood and she was wasting: Decay.

Consumption.

The scent of her diseased blood was stirred further by the air as we moved across frozen lane and woodland path. I swallowed repeatedly, forcing my venom down my throat, rapt with each word she uttered. I was desperate to distract myself from the scent of warm human blood and the looming frenzied need to feed.

The horses were already riderless when we arrived. I made my goodbyes to the young Grand Duchess and she agreed, at my insistence, to remain in the sleigh and entertain herself with a new novel in English. I promised to send Janos back from the hunt to capture a few stolen moments with her amid the starkly beautiful winter environs.

As I passed the stable boys holding the horses, several of the Habsburg's proud Austrian Lippazans rose in irritation, bucking their forelegs and crying out in desperate whinnies as they pulled against their grooms. With a low and threatening growl rising in my throat, the colossal and storied beasts silenced as I passed, drawing a haughty amusement from me at their _strum und drang_.

Even without the myriad arrangement of footprints in the snow, the gathering was easy to find. The exquisite bouquet of human scent wafted from the bitter fragrance of snow and I gnashed my carnassial teeth in frustration. Ahead, the group spread, clearly tracking the pungent beast I smelled over their own, more redolent posy-perfume.

Suddenly, my own instincts blazed.

I was being tracked.

Lifting my head, I scented, and found _dog_.

A furious dog, none other than Edouard's massive hunting Kuvasz, his cultivated need to protect and defend sparking off him like a Catherine Wheel.

Our blackening eyes fixed on each other, warning snarls echoing to the other across the white expanse. In my periphery, Edouard turned, his eyes searching, then alighting on me.

"Jakov!" he called to the cur who pawed at the snow and crouched, readying for attack. "Jakov, here!"

The enormous white animal pounced and raced towards me, his impetuous barking punctuated with foolish bluster.

I plotted madly, working out how a human woman might react to such an attack. It would come within full view of the hunting party and my descent into animalistic rage could reveal all. I affected a horrified gasp, turning my body slightly from the charging beast and willed myself into the quiet sanctuary of my mind, much as I had occasion to do under the Countess' ministrations.

"Jakov!" Edouard called again as he ran towards us, his voice full of fury and..._fear__?_

The substantial dog sprung for me and we tumbled to the hard packed snow, his disgusting dripping muzzle at my throat immediately. I made dumb-show of resistance, all the while shuttering my senses with supreme effort.

Amid the sounds of the assault, Edouard's voice rang out clear in outrage. With the hand obscured by the dog's body, I pulled as lightly as I might at his fur to distract him. He yelped in complaint and redoubled his assault, spraying me with his revolting saliva as he attempted to find purchase around my diamond-hard throat.

I was slipping quickly, my control scattering to the wind as this animal attempted yet another parry.

Just as I batted the side of the dog towards a stand of beech, the staccato crack of gunshot heralded a rush of heated, bloody mist showering my face and arms. The dog flew across the field with the combined force of Edouard's shot and my angry thrust.

I was covered in warm, thick droplets of blood.

Springing to my feet, I raced, barely under control, away from the hunting party, with Edouard in pursuit. Senses hazed with the scent and taste of fresh blood spurred me on into the forest. When out of sight, the veil dropped and I allowed my body full reign, racing through the rapidly thickening woodland until Edouard's voice became a distant, then unintelligible murmur behind my hissing, snarling fury.

And then, like running into a stone wall…_ah_, _áldot__t__ András__!_

I caught the musk of a predator.

I crouched, scanning the underbrush, until I spotted it: a perfect male lynx pawing and tearing at the remains of some small animal. The big cat's purrs as it fed would serve to camouflage any slight misstep as I crept behind it. I readied, then pounced. The feline snarled, thrashing about in my arms like an Earth-bound Swan embracing my Leda. His neck was easy work under my hand; I punctured his most vital vein neatly with a talon-like nail. The thick crimson nectar was such soothing balm to the inferno in my throat, I sighed as the tension flowed from my body in waves. Feeding, normally pleasurable, was quite intense after such a long tormented afternoon of denial and then the surge of battle with Edouard's dog.

I clutched the cooling Lynx to me as the last drops of blood traveled into my mouth, steadying myself against the pale papery bark of a birch tree. As my field of observation shifted slightly, a most unnatural sight appeared on the landscape. Standing at the top of the ravine and watching the entire scene was Edouard. He made no move to run in horror nor to call to his men to attempt to restrain me so they might give me to their priests for amusements equal only to the Countess Bathory herself.

No, Edouard stood, staunch and, frankly, mesmerized.

He worked his jaw slightly, teeth grinding at each other. I lowered my eyes, before snapping them to his quickly, taunting him as I gave my whole body over to drawing blood from the Lynx's body.

Edouard Joseph, Archduke of Hungary and Prince Habsberg watched me feed; pinked under his hawkish brows, he reached out to a heavy oak tree to steady himself. His tongue flicked at his lips and his face was a tapestry of want.

"My God," he mused to himself. I could hear him quite clearly, even at such distance.

He wasn't frightened in the least.

_He was aroused._

I tongued delicately at a small drop of blood in profile, then faced him and made my way back to his side. My gaze never faltered from his, even as I fisted his linen collar and pulled his plump confection of a mouth down to mine. His tongue swirled greedily inside mine, shuddering as he had his first taste of what would eventually sustain him.

I broke from the kiss with a harsh sigh and dabbed my lips with the back of my hand, dodging my tongue against the taste of him there. My eyebrow lifted slowly and I kneeled, placing the spent shell of the lynx at his feet.

"The spoils of the hunt, Prince," I whispered, in advance of disappearing into the forest in a flash of scarlet and black.

* * *

**  
**~Did we manage to surprise you? Have Esmerelda and Edouard captured your attention? Please send us a comment~

**List of Characters in Order of Appearance:  
**Esmerelda Davrulia - Esme

Edouard Joseph Leopold – Edward

_Báthory Erzsébet_, Elisabeth Bathory, The Countess, Her Grace is a real historical figure -- wikipedia her, if you dare.

Teodor – Emmett

Janos Fitalezred Vitlok - Jasper

Elisabeth Amalia, Queen Consort of Hungary - Elizabeth Masen

Edward Alexander Leopold- Edward, Sr.

Alizka - Alice  
**  
**

_~~ll~~_

Final notes:

Winterstales o/s _Homecoming_ is up for a Twific Indie in the Love Conquers All o/s category.

My _Incarcerated_ is also up for two Indies: Best Love Triangle Complete, and Love Conquers All Novella. Voting until the 25th of March, link on my profile.

Winterstale will be updating her _Sire_ next week (it's Emmett, AU, awesome!) and you'll have the next chapter of my _Youth without Age and Life without Death_ also next week.


	2. Ecstasy and Expatriation

Thanks very much to Vanessarae for looking into, and shaping up, the weird, wild imaginings of our minds!

An extra happy birthday to Gasaway Alley and a smooch to Viola Cornuta.

The song that inspired us (that's me and the wondrous **winterstale**) for this chapter was _Host of the Seraphim, _by Dead Can Dance.

* * *

**Chapter Two: **_**Ecstasy**_** and Expatriation**

_**Budai Vár,**__** Álöltözet golyó  
**_**Buda Castle,****Masquerade Ball**

Arriving alone, I was shown up a grand, curving staircase to the second floor and into the ballroom by a man of higher service. Four pairs of intricately carved doors were thrown open to frame the bacchanalian banquet of sumptuous, courtly proportions inside. Three times as long as it was wide, the glittering dancehall was walled with rococo details in arches and fanciful curlicues. In the middle of every section, an elegant, precious metal sconce held the weight of upwards of sixteen lit candles. Each panel decorated in gilt was mirrored by an alcove encasing large windows overlooking the equally illuminated jardin à la française with her avenues, parterres, and reflection pools. The terraced lawn beyond led to a folly on the opposite shore of yet another manmade lagoon.

Stopping beneath one of the ornate, filigreed candelabra that had been raised so as not to interfere with the cotillion, I looked about the gathered aristocracy; only the highest strata of society was in attendance this night. Circular banquettes in ivory, crimson, and gold were arranged artfully amidst the throng whose skirts swept with the rustle of richest fabrics, and chinked with the embellishment of daintily appliquéd jewels.

Dashing figures cut swathes with their ladies, dancing through a minuet, hands touching just at the fingertips as the lines of men and women met, parted, and paired anew to the soft, innocent measure of the musicians.

It was only hours after the hunt during which Edouard had come upon me, wildly feasting from the lynx, yet those monstrous minutes that had held us apart felt more endless than all my years with the Bloody Lady of Čachtice.

For _him_, again, I was searching.

Instead, I found Janos Vitlok.

"Ah, Baroness." He greeted me with a perfectly executed bow.

"Fitzrehd Vitlok, what a singular pleasure," I replied as I sunk into a courtly and flirtatious curtsy. My afternoon with his Alizka had warmed me to the junior officer, and our play at courteous interchange was easy and light-hearted. At that, he had none of the bristling arrogance of the Prince and thus, my tribute was easily given.

"The lovely Grand Duchess? Has she been stolen from you by some other suitor?"

A heavy shadow passed over his eyes and he lifted his brows sadly. "No, if only it were some other beau I might charm her away from. She is abed again, suffering exhaustion from the afternoon out of doors."

"Oh, dear., I said, patting his hand with sincere regret. "Such a brave girl. She speaks of you with noteworthy devotion."

"And I have pledged like dedication to her. If she…" he stopped, inhaling sharply and squaring his broad shoulders. "She is all that I am, everything I hold dear in this life. Without…" His speech trailed, impotent in the knowledge of what was surely ahead.

He _was_ a remarkable specimen, strong and finely made.

_Perhaps…_

"I do so regret this news, Commander Vitlok. Won't you please relay my most fervent wishes for Her Highness' recovery and hope we might ride out together soon?"

"Of course, Baroness." Leaning down, he brushed the back of my hand with his lips behind a tumble of blond hair.

"Might you favor me with a dance later, Baroness? Alizka won't mind. She does so love to waltz." The sadness in his voice chipped at my usual reserve. His heart was given; there would be no recovery from the loss of his little Duchess. I patted his cheek with an affection that disarmed me, and smiled up at him with great sincerity.

"In honor of Her Highness, nothing would bring me greater happiness, Commander." I offered my dance card and he filled in his name quickly. After completing his claim, he returned the little book to me and stood once again with perfect military deportment.

"Until the waltz, Baroness."

Inclining my head demurely, I offered a little bow and even pressed his large, capable hand slightly in mine.

The poor boy would be bereft without his Alizka.

_But still, perhaps…_

A pair of jocular jesters jingled around me, grinning in their harlequin habille, the bells chiming off their toes. They brushed boldly into me, and I quelled the immediate urge to make mincemeat of them.

For that wouldn't do.

The extravagant fools kept getting in my way! For a moment, I thought I glimpsed a tall man with a heaping of bronze atop his head like fire on Icarus' wings, and thought it the most absurd sight I'd witnessed. Before I could be certain, my vision was shrouded by a black and white masqued Harlequin snapping a whip while a figure in a dreadful bear costume performed acrobatic feats atop a gilded perch.

The theme of this _bal masqué_ was The Hunted of Hungary. As such we were to marry our sauvage side.

_I felt exactly that, hunted, as I waded through the crowd of hot humans now placing steps to a Mazurka, looking for Edouard, feeling an excited current as I imagined him watching for me.  
_

In deciding upon my attire and hiding piece, I had no choice in the matter. _For I would always be the tigresse.  
_

A sweet-scented dove flew to close to me from her perch on a Viscount's arm. A comedic sheep bleeted in my ear. A round of gazelles, a stampede of stallions, a flock of peacocks surrounded me and pulled away.

The music magically enchanted from simplicity to sultriness with an allegro moderato.

Crashing like waves to shore, the sounds threw a mermaid spell about me, _and him.  
_

_Finally.  
_

Though masked, I recognized Edouard readily. His carriage flawless, his sphynx eyes piercing mine, and his undimmed hair shockingly, beautifully disheveled.

I observed the wealth of ruffles enveloping his throat move with the strain of breathing and swallowing, when he came closer from the far side of the narrow room, never losing sight of me as I slowly, tantalizingly, removed the gold-shot, black lace wrap from my shoulders, folding down the high, sheer, jet collar from its magnificent plume behind my neck.

Revealed, I handed the stole to the waiting hands of the valet still standing in his place, at the left of my shoulder.

**  
**Offering me an heirloom flute of champagne, he was before me in a moment. Strolling over my body, he made sure to tuck his gaze to my half-bared bosom lifting out of the saffron sheath of my Regency gown. Onyx beads and diamond shards trimmed the empire dress around the high waistline, along the cap sleeves and upon the square neckline. Full, but unfitted, as befitted the times, my skirt fell to the floor with more bullion threads shooting through, ending in a paisley bejeweled pattern. Leaning in, as if saturating himself in my primal, tangy perfume, Edouard raised his gloved hand to touch the coif of my tresses piled high and decorated with yet more of the blinking emeralds dripping into my generous décolletage. The luminescent flickering of a thousand votives wouldn't outshine me tonight.

In keeping with the game of the soiree, to guess the identity of the ball-goers, Edouard never straightened, but dipped his knees to meet my eyes, "Shall I hazard a guess, Madame?"

"If you so wish to conjecture, Sir," I raised an eyebrow and dallied my hand along the fullness of his forearm.

If I had remained to true to my spirit in my facade, so had Edouard. The dalmations of his ancestry were also of his breed; the Leopold was a leopard in every sense of the word. Proud and tall, sinewy of lengthy muscle, trim but hewn from the Olympians-- easily seen were the ripples of taut tissue flourishing beneath his full dress. The shawl collar of his coat accented his steep jaw, and the oceanic blue pushed more of a flush to his cheeks, barely visible beneath the velvety, roguish rigging of his mask.

He'd never looked more devilish, more handsome, _more derelict_.

While I perused, for more than a minute, he jokingly took up his fob and opened the antique case, ingesting a dark chuckle. Draping one arm around my nude neck, he pulled me towards him with impropriety, he whispered against my ear so I had to muzzle the moan that wanted to forego my lips.

His breath hitched and mine stayed.

The tip of his tongue touched me, "_Esmerelda Davrulia...tigresse."  
_

Suavely, he kissed the feminine dimple of my chin and matched his mouth to mine, but held away so only our breaths tangled, "You are positively divine."

To the toes of my flat shoes, I elevated myself and chanced a brush against his clean-shaven jaw, a kitten's lick to the corner of his mouth, "And you look absolutely diabolical, _Edouard Leopold._"

He shivered. I pushed my plump bosom closer to his torso, reveling in the silken caress of all those ruffles and his hard chest underneath.

**  
**The pared-down orchestra began a fresh quadrille. Pulling away, he asked for my company, "Dance?"

His was a deep bow to my sweeping curtsy, and we joined the fray.

**  
**Aligned, we eyed each other up, grinning in anticipation.

As we met in the middle of the arched gathering, our palms kissed but didn't twine. Even gloved, with our fingers hardly touching, no other parts of our bodies mating, the sateen of fabric shielding contact, _even then_, exhilaration throbbed between us.

Once I felt his hand at my back.

Then I curved my leg outward so our thighs touched.

His muted groan almost found the nape of my neck.

Reasonably, I brushed my breast against his upper arm.

Each time we passed the other in this parsimonious dance, our flesh harmonized and strived to touch.

Through the clapping of hands at the end, he nodded and I fought for angelic countenance

Unceremoniously, he pulled my wrist and propelled me against him.

Another jerk of his head to the maestro and he gathered me forcibly to him.

I gasped and clasped his proffered hand, slumbered into the palm placed at my lower back. His heat ignited me. My hand upon his shoulder was licentious as I felt each tendon slip and rise.

Dipping with the stings and reeds, Edouard embraced me and turned us sensuously about the ballroom with a steady, languid pace that magnified the want erupting between us. On each turn, he held me closer, tighter, mimicking the upbeat of the instruments as they worked from baritone to tenor, tenuously titillating the ache and compulsion exacting its toll from our bodies.

Rakishly resplendent, Edouard's marbled orbs lapped to my mouth and back to my own leadened look.

With each turn, our flesh came closer, more risqué.

Heathenish, he bent low to the bones at the base of my neck to murmur, "You're unchaperoned?" Lifting his head, swirling all those ginger-bright locks up my throat, his eyes were alight with possibilities.

I pursed my dianthus mouth to his Adam's apple...something I'd wanted to do since I first saw him. His hips jerked into me, and I felt the heaviness of his penis sliding against my thigh, a hard, blood-pulsing piece of him. "_Tsk,_ young man. One of my station and age has no need of keepers." Still within the rules of decorum, _just_, I brought his shoulders closer, his torso to mine so he could feel the peaks of my breasts.

Turbulence of composition crescendoed!

Each plane of our beings sought its mate in the other and became kin; solid to plush, tensing, living length to an unbreakable, yet pooling, ossuary.

His deep kestrel eyes looked at me from behind the velveteen mask.

Opening his mouth, he gladed over mine, and I gladdened to unlock my own as my bundled tresses almost met the floor, the small of my back held over his knee.

Shaking, he pulled me up from the dip. Shaken, I wondered, _What now?  
_

A slim, slanting smile pursed his lips and he curtly relinquished me, back to my reliquary.

Strides leonine and powered with prowess, he pounced out the doors, not deigning to look back.

Flouncing back my skirts, I glowered menacingly at an aping cockerel preening before me.

My nose in the air, my feet faster than Ares, I followed the leopard's musk.

_**Nádori kripta**_**  
Palatinal Crypt**

Torches replaced the more expensively wrought light fixtures.

By the time I entered the concave cellar, I was spitting, cursing..._furious!_

Why had he turned heel so quickly?

Was he nothing more than a cad?

I was _not_ to be treated this way.

"_A pokolba vele!"_

His voice was sibilant, "_To hell with me? _ Surely that's no manner for a lady to speak."

Spinning around, I made him out in the shadows. Only the crispness of his white shirt was apparent. He'd taken off his coat. In shirtsleeves so voluminous they were like white-capped currents, his cravat tugged free, the roué was laughing at me.

Upon closer scrutiny, I caught sight of his hand moving up and down his groin. He was stroking himself.

I spat, "And _that_ is no way for a gentleman to act!"

"You'll certainly disapprove of this then," He pressed his buttons free, overlapped his thighs with the fabric of his fall-front. Opening his cock to the cooled air where mortuary watched on, far less keen than I.

Both his hands wrapped around the beribboned-with-vein member standing against his abdomen. His shaft was wide and long, and lovely. Lascivious. _The sight of it made me crazed!_

"No?" his inhalations were more strident, but still he mocked me as he palmed his head, spreading the liquid all over the tall mast inside his handhold. "No words of-" he bent his head back and grunted as his fist hit the base of his cock, "disapprobation?"

Undone, I shivered and silently shook my head with the enormous, white marble statuary of Palatine Joseph watching over my shoulder.

"Envious?" he inquired as his fists continued to squire up and down his tumescence.

I couldn't respond through the stricture of my throat. The shimmering emeralds sliding between my breasts rose higher with each fought-for breath. Unable to do anything more than appease my eyes with the satyr-like vision before me, I licked my lips of venom and slowly stepped closer to my quarry.

The patina of bald flame flickered across his grip. Up and down, spiraling, tightening. Releasing a few times so that I might see the effect of his ministrations upon his cock, tremblingly engorged into a sensually huge muscle I _needed_ to touch, lick, swallow.

His smirk hardened as his arousal grew.

Our nostrils flared to the musk evaporating off him.

His shirttails flapped, revealing and then secreting away the object of my desire, and I took one more footstep in his direction, my hands already reaching out, my lips already parted.

The ropey muscles in his throat moved in a dance between shadow and light in this vaulted brick room of dead air, now a sultry Sultan's lair instead of a musty tomb.

Edouard was sex and fare. Imperiously he called to me with his low voice unaided by breath, a raw and raspy thing, "Now, now, m'lady, no touching."

_He would dare stop me?_

I was goaded forward and it seemed he was as excited as me for when I approached, every sinew in his body bunched in a sculpture of ecstatic proportions, seized in a bronzed effigy as he came with a roar! My proximity to his orgasm allowed the spray of his ejaculate to rain over my hands with streams of hot liquid. With the drops of viscosity running between my fingers, I imagined the fountain of bloodiness I could make erupt from the still-thumping rivery vein in his throat.

Throwing off our masks, we stared at one another, both fighting for air, both covered in his release.

He did not bother to put himself back together.

Furious anew at the relaxed scoundrel who'd sadistically denied me a pleasure I'd wanted, I incredulously demanded, "You would desecrate your forbearers' bones in such a way?" But then, unable to resist, I licked my fingers free of the gelatin smoothness, quietly moaning at his taste. _Wondering about his blood. _

He laughed, "_Tigresse,_ would you like to help me clean up?"

_Tigresse._

_I was she again, in the decades following my turning in 1598.  
_**  
**  
During the eons that crawled, I found I didn't particularly like my own breed, though admittedly some were witty. We certainly abounded in this arena, Eastern Europe with her history guided by medieval superstitions made a just theatre for us denizens of the dead. Over time, I flitted hither and thither, homing in on Budapest like a carrier pigeon, a bird of prey to its perch upon scabbarded arm. To one I could never have foreseen.

The lavish salons of the era, the opera, the luxury and art and music called to the Bohemian, the _Cigány_, in all of us. I was not such a mercenary that I didn't appreciate the freedom afforded by the company of my people.

I only martyred myself every few years as I thought, rapaciously, of the dam who had made me this spiteful, prurient creature.

Of course, I was always _overly fond_ of the human race, not for their taste alone, but to remember my own motivations and feelings, to wonder anew what I might have become had I been set on a different path, one not so close to a slippery cliff of unfortunate demise.

Had I not risen, undead, would I have loved?

Decades of denial made crossroads with flagrant civilian bloodiness. I would turn to animals to banquet on, the tone of my eyes shifting from standard, startling crimson, to lavish. stunning amber.

While my mind scurried away from this place, Edouard situated himself boldly before me, reclaiming his cock to his pants, effortlessly buttoning his trousers, straightening his coat, symbolic with legions of heraldry embroidered and stitched across his chest that had slowed from his gorgeous, streaming, loud release.

Wakened from reverie, never from sleep, I followed his steps to me, magnetized by his reaching arms, his deadly roguish charms. In the catacomb, light from torches in iron sconces playing like demon's exhalations through the windsweep of his hair, pushing shadow against my richly crusted gown, following the hills of my breasts, illuming the crevasse between. Near panting by the time my skirt skimmed his thigh, winding into the abyss he'd opened, he tugged loose tendrils at my temple with one hand, caressed my opened collar and neck with his other. Pain, _and pleasure. _ Both callous, and concerned.

Quiet with lips brushing my cheeks, he moved across my mouth.

Bolshy hands roamed my chest, seeking entry, slipping his fingers into the very low, unchaste neckline, sliding those long, feverish digits deeper until they met both my pink, tight nipples. Face full of blood working in ardor up from his chest, he groaned and pushed his resurgent erection against me. Mightily, I pulled his hair and slipped my hands down the slices of muscle right to his bottom, clasping him closer, mewling. The nips at my forehead and earlobes and bottom lip emboldened me. I rasped against him like a soft feline, all limbs and bosom and derriere and hips needful of more, more, _more._

And blood.

Forcing him away so his shoulder clipped yet one more sarcophagus, I made for the entrance.

In ownership of himself he commanded, "_Allj!_"

I frowned...to be ordered again? I didn't want this feudal pull. But to fight it would be futile.

"Istenem!" _My God!_ "You are real." Staking me out so I fell to a bleak corner, the mortar of this mortuary alone holding me up, Edouard closed in. Warily, as if approaching a untamable fox, he hounded me with his utterances, "You understand, Esmerelda, when I touch you like this," tentatively but not trembling, he stroked my hair from my forehead, pushed the pad of his thumb to the inured vein beneath my chin, making me arch like a cathedral's rampart into his masculinity, "_Gusts of fire leap through my skin, and I can almost understand you."_

Incandescence glowed like a carriage's lantern in eyes whose color could only be found in deep mines replaced the penury of spirit he'd catapulted into, this Apostolic King with every fancy granted before he even asked.

Before him, I became querulous.

Battling his forearms, slapping at his thighs and chest and back, I used sallow strength. Swallowing a glut of venom, I hissed, "_You know nothing, ifjú!" _ In calling him _young man_ I hoped to demean him, show him his place, before I strafed against his beautiful throat to sickeningly usurp the tide of red inside.

Wrapping me within his arms, bands of strength and bountiful humanness, cologne of kings and masculinity untold, he shushed and stilled me, hushed and excited me, against my ear, he breathed, "Not a woman of this earth. Not a maid of this domain. Not a lady of manse or mortality." Skipping those sculptured, alizarin lips across the side of my face, he licked my mouth and tongued inside, "I've watched you feed, _asszonyom,"_ milady, "I know your tastes. You decline the table's food. You beguile, you make me a fool!"

He clasped me forcibly to him, understanding I could break his hold, tear off his arms, sink my teeth into him at the rate of a supernatural serpent, and yet he held me, soothed me, besotted me further, "_You want me."_

Undulations of terrifying derivations placed my hips exactly against him, definitely where I wanted him. _Inside me. If not running riot through my veins, then thrusting magisterially between my legs._

I writhed and pounded, ached and resounded, "You do NOT know me!"

_  
_In an act that would have found me killing a lesser man, Edouard gripped my hands and tied them with one manacling hold above my head, biting a harsh, rough, "Be still, Esmerelda."

Tossing my head to the side, I denied his kiss, his touch.

I simply wanted him too much.

_What did he know?_

Nubile and near lazy, I slithered, snake-like, a concubine, out of his grasp. Slowly lower. Down to the floor. Between his legs. beneath him, _again_. Tendons stood bluish-purple along the wrist pounding the wall above me, a dynastic road to destruction.

With the full breadth of his penis in front of me, I couldn't help myself from breathing on it to watch it jump inside its binding. Couldn't help myself from running my tongue over the straightness of it from root to canopy, because his shape and form rivaled all my imaginings of such a wealthy, weighty weapon.

His knee lunged against my shoulder, his voice foundered like charcoal, "_Yes, please yes! _ Why are you starving me?_"_

Starving?

Starving _him?_

I was the only one famished. Famished for him!

Angered, I bowed between his legs and berthed behind him. "I do not owe you anything, _Leopold._"

My hands made a helpless pillow over my face, hiding my fright and denial and desire, the wrack of despotism, "_You will never own me, you don't know me."_

Unable to look at him again, his _starving_ physique so filled with life, so swelled with sex and secularity, his lush bottom lip, his historic eyes, I turned heel and soared away, my speed a thing not even his Kuvoz could catch on a good day.

Against my back, as if his hands walked erogenously over me still, I heard his distant call like a lover's sotto voce simper against the shell of my ear, "_Válnak_! I know you. _You are mine."_

_**Gellért-hegy**_**  
Gellert Hill  
**

They were convening at _Gellért-hegy__, _on the Sabbath following the hunt_. _ I knew he would be there. The greuling task of remaining apart had weakened me for the sight of him. It was a commemoration of the death of sainted Bishop Gellert who'd met his demise here, forced into a barrel and rolled down the steep hillside, during the pagan rebellion of 1046. It was rumored yet one more _boszorkány_ witch felt Gellert's fire crackling beneath her feet when the revolt started, ending in only his death.

Now, a processional wound up the cliffs, banners raised, steeds pawing earth with their hooved treads. Troubadors marched and made merry. Time was kept with drums whose beats rang across the hillside. Chorales swarmed about my ears, deafening me. Minions lovingly strode behind their masters with no misstep over the rubble raising dust to their bowed faces.

Announcing my furious need to see Edouard, voice and music plead to the ever-near Heavens.

To the top, the battlements, they coiled like an aristocratic snake whose head would soon be chopped off by the blade of the populace.

For now, at least, Edouard's handsome pomposity was pronounced, and made me want him all the more.

He sat up upon his Lippezan. Majestically leading the parade. Lounging in the shade of the citadel, I leaned out as he passed just enough so the bright flash of my crimson gown captured him.

With no thought for pomp and circumstance, he held his fist in the air to halt the column.

All was silence.

I stepped back, banners dropped, and he in his Hussar's insignia catapulted from stallion to ground. With conceit, he didn't bother to make sure the reigns were caught.

Snapping like leafy branches, he delved his eyes into the fortress for me.

Behind him, the procession moved forward, eclipsing the mountain and falling off down the other side.

A wind picked up from the Danube far below the summit, tossing up my skirts, my liberated hair. While my clothing and locks fled back to him, I flew away from him.

A chase to the cave of _Szent Iván-barlang_.

It was no mistake I let myself be cornered in the rocky dolmen. There'd be no witnesses to this tryst, no matter how it should end.

My back to an outcropping, I turned, "What do you know?"

"Esmerelda, _Esme,_" he approached me familiarly, spoke a diminutive form of my name as if he held rights over me...his voice was slumbrous like his eyes. Deadly, bass-deep, a singular cello choking me like the strands of taut strings under his bow, rasping me back and forth, hypnotizing me. Appetizing me. Whetting my mouth with toxin, the substance viscous and lethal like the _Veninum Lupinum_ I'd employed to guide my beloved Teodor to death.

As if there was a rhythm in his word alone, my hips weaved closer.

If I had ever had free will, it was gone now. Given over with supplicant's hands to this knave who would be my knight.

In lieu of complying immediately, Edouard found the ground at my feet in obsequiousness I would honor.

Kissing my instep so just that touch tantalized me, he ran his hands up the scarlet ribbons of my slippers and my legs parted to the brush of his hands _as he knelt, before his queen....finally._

Behind my calves, the streamers loosened and fell.

His fingers spread and followed and then his moist breath in whispery kisses.

"What do you know?" I repeated.

"That you want me, _as a man_, though you would not. Should not as Transylvanian Saxon," pushing up my skirts, he sucked behind my knees.

I was unshod, my footing unstable.

"You are eternal, to my rotting House of Habsburg," those firm hands teased my thighs, his palms causing me to cry out.

"You have no place in this world," Edouard delivered his statement and then his mouth to the apex of my body.

I gasped, "And neither shall you, soon."

No longer belligerent, he brought down my underdressings, slid his tongue around my lips, and wound inside me like the tightening of a harpischord's fugue.

My skirts knotted in his hands at my hips, my weight held in his clasp, my slit tasted and played with as I craved to understand -- my heart compacted to coal. My ache, an unbearable ancient longing to mate with this young man, only just in his prime. The pain so devastating it had incapacitated me from the first time I'd come across him! My itinerant spirit wanted a home.

My neck braced away from stone and I could but declare, "_Ahhhh, ah ah! Edouard!"_

He traveled deliciously up and around every swollen, needy shell of my nether lips until I was thrusting in time with his tongue.

Unhinged, I grabbed his paprika hair and wept as he boldly worked up me, opening my dress, unstitching my short stays from above my waist to below my tits. My breasts toppled into his hands, hands that held, fingers that explored, fingertips that knew to rasp softly and slowly across my nipples.

A kiss--from the sweet brush of first lovers, quickly congealing into the heated, base jousting of slick tongues, to teeth and lips and inner-cheeks--never ended.

His hand found the place his mouth had made more wet. Fingers turned me more liquid with their desultory strokes inside, outside, reaching as high as my thrilling nub and low as the cleft of my buttocks.

He continued to answer my question in ragged huffs, "You are alone."

How he could even think was beyond me!

"As are you," I whispered into his ear.

He took my hand and guided it inside the open pocket of his breeches, swerving against me as my fingers touched his solid, wide, heavy erection, "Your eyes change."

I struggled for composure, but ended up ripping away the fall-front of his trousers to grasp him completely in my fists, "Yours have changed now."

He pounded the boulder above my head, my hair snagged on slatey stones. Our fingers were two parts of a whole, moving suredly, with increasing frenzy.

From his combat, a rivulet of blood ran from his forearm to the inside of his elbow; unstaunched, it carried on beneath the billowy sleeve of his blouson where I knew it would forage into his oxeter.

I keened and lapped at his arm, pulled harder and faster on his cock, fondled his full sacs.

He never ceased. Jerking into me, his shaft in my hands, his fingers filling me, "You want me-"

He reared back and bellowed while I quivered and aimed his cum at my belly, "As a _meal._"

I suckled his neck and gyrated out of myself with my climax.

_He knew._

_No man in the __Roman Empire__ had garnered my favor thus._

Yet, there were two who existed in the form of men to whom I owed everything.

After the Countess had been detained within her home and Mama had finally been dispatched to the hell she surely deserved, I was designated her last personal servant. There would be no others, she was told, so best keep me alive if she cared for a ladysmaid during her confinement.

Indeed, she kept me alive each time.

Pulling the blood from my body, careful to keep her venom away from my veins, she bled me to the precipice of death, then carefully nursed me back to health only to feed upon me again.

I never knew definitively but my estimates numbered the years of this endless cycle of near death and almost-rebirth at four.

In the times when I was too weak from her feeding, I would lie under the iron-barred skylight and count the passing of the days by the shadows marching from one side of the tower to its opposite. The repeated leechings and inadequate food took its toll. By the end, I could barely walk, and reeked of a pestilence settling in to my innards. After so many I had stood by and allowed to suffer misery at Her Grace's hand, I felt it proper that I should so linger.

Already the very face of inhumanity, she soon became completely inhuman as well. When I was unavailable for harvest, she would dine on the rats that besieged the tower, tossing their empty corpses casually against the far corner to join their decaying brethren. She was in too much of a weakened state herself to spring skyward to the skylight or even consider moving the iron bars: these were feats I knew her capable of prior to her incarceration. Occasionally, a bird would fly in the open, barred windows that provided some ventilation. Eventually she would feed upon them as well; all who fell behind the sealed door were sacrifices to her bloodhunger.

What was likely the fourth year dawned, for it was the fourth March I could recall since the Lutheran priests watched the old peasant lay the bricks and stone over our only egress. Their litanies of murmured prayers droned for hours in shaking voices. With crosses and braids of garlic held aloft, as though they might stop My Lady, we were eternally sealed within.

One evening, during a frightful storm so violent I feared again for the skylight's stability, I watched in awe as the entire structure lifted aside and a black-swathed figure bounded nimbly down the stone wall. I was snatched from my meager bedding on the hearth rug as the Countess screeched in fury. She clutched me against her like a girl's plaything, my head lolling weakly against her still-formidable body.

Willing myself to settle, as a drumming heartbeat would only spur her on, I turned to consider the advancing figure. In the dim candlelight he was little more than a towering swath of gliding black drapery, topped with a milky visage that, while dull, glittered faintly in the flickering glow of the tallow-candle. Raven's wing hair fell in gentle waves around his fine-boned face, the sensual curve of his mouth and haughty lift of his chin made me gasp a little. His was a sinister beauty, but beauty nonetheless. Unlike Her Grace, his scent was not of reeking decay, but frankincense, amber, and even more ancient spices. I think I might have swooned a little at his presence.

"_Ördög! Lenni elveszett! El pokolba veled , démon!_" My Lady wheezed.

Like an imbecile, I twittered quietly from the confines of her putrid body. She, the very embodiment of repugnant Asmodeus' bride, dispatching this beautiful creature to the place below was almost incomprehensible.

"Eliza, you have caused some trouble, it would seem, in my absence."

"I owe you no fealty, Vladmir."

His eyebrow cocked jauntily and he laughed as though she had just recounted a pleasant little woman's anecdote.

"Your allegiance to Stefan and me is absolute, Eliza. All of this…" he laughed again. "Well all it was until your insanity and greed sullied it, you owe to us."

"I am as powerful as you, you fiend!" she hissed, her grip on me constricting as adjunct of her compounding rage.

"Eliza…you are but a simpleton, placed conveniently in a position you have abused to the point of folly," he said as though he were recounting the morning's breakfast victuals.

"Lies!" Before I could detect his movement, he was directly in front of us, still smiling placidly despite the threat of his advance. It seemed as if he glamoured her in some way, for her body went slack in his gaze. I crumpled to the floor, my body weakened by years of service as her toy and nourishment. His eyes, the exact color of claret, cast down to me and he did the most remarkable thing.

He smiled.

There was no hint of ominousness or appraisal about it. In fact, it was gentle and kind, even. My life had known no gesture of kindness in so long, eighteen years - an entire lifetime for many - since she had butchered my beloved brother. Teodor's battered face was the last I saw look benevolently in my direction. Eighteen years since the most simple of expressions, one cast so thoughtlessly by the baker towards a good loaf, by a child at a tumbling kitten with a ball of wool.

Under his gaze, my entire being, what she had left to decay like the mountain of vermin in the corner, homed to him.

I wanted to be his. _As one of them._

His eyes roamed my face as his brows lifted in surprise. "Ah…. _ban jó idő , szépség._"

I would wait forever!

Turning again to the Countess, his visage and the very air about him turned icy. She stepped backward, shaking.

"They will come! They will hear my screams and come!" she threatened.

"Eliza….dear," he laughed with a dismissive turn of his head. "The humans will not come. They think both of you quite mad. They will only hope you are finally ending each other so the guards and priests may leave this place."

"I…I've done nothing but what you asked of me, Vladmir. You and Stefan wanted an observer and so I was…I know things…_many things_." She stuttered and looked in panic at the room as if it might have her supposed secrets inscribed on the limestone walls. "You still need me, Vladmir! Take me from here, dispose of this tired old pet of mine and take me from here! I'll tell you everything: tales of the Volturi. They are in league with the Roman Church you know…let us leave here and I'll tell you the whole story while there's time to stop them!"

The being she called Vladmir shook his head slowly, appearing quite weary already of her entreaties.

"Please, tell me, maid, as you have been by the Countess' side for so long. What have you heard of these intrigues? It is no secret that servants know the best gossip in a castle."

"She is mute! She's a simpleton and a mute!" my Lady crowed, pointing a quaking finger at me as if to silence me.

For the first time since I was a little maid of thirteen, a tiny, frightened child brought to this _thing_ by my own mother to earn my keeping and instead forced to pay for it with pieces of flesh and soul, a girl so yoked with hopelessness she could do nothing for her beloved brother but quietly abide his most grievous torture, gifting him the release from his torment only by death from stolen poison, a woman turned into chattel and concubine by her own Mistress….for the first time in an endless sea of blood and filth and heinous cruelty, I spoke.

"She took hundreds, if not thousands. Far more than she needed to feed. She desecrated their bodies, maimed them in the most horrible of ways. She killed to kill, it was her entertainment; she laughed at their pleas and then turned lustful. She used my own mother to satisfy her needs. She tortured my brother to death in the vilest manner. She feeds from me and then nurses me to strength, only to suck again when I recover." The accusations tumbled forth like a broken dam. Tonight was my own release, by one means or another, and I would not leave this human life without giving voice to my years of servitude under this bitch. I turned to her, drawing up the last vestiges of strength in my body and met her eyes, emboldened by my certain death.

"She drained them. _She bathed in their blood_." I concluded with a voice ringing clear and true over nature's storming din outside. Narrowing my eyes at her, I imagined casting my invisible fetters back at her. I was hers no more.

The Countess' face contorted in fury and she made to come for me but was stopped by an obstacle: Vladmir stepped in her path, clucking his tongue as he might at an errant child.

"Eliza…you have put us all at risk. Even the Volturi know of you and think you quite mad. 'An abomination among abominations,' I believe Aro pronounced you. You should be grateful, they are deliberating sending a small army for you…and I promise Aro is planning to visit some of your more spectacular horrors on you."

"They will listen to me! Someone will listen to me and not this…_peasant_." She spat, thrusting a shaking hand, turned claw-like, down and wrenching me to her by my scalp. Even my hair was weakened: I tumbled again, unable to catch my descent before I struck my head on the limestone floor, now missing a great chunk of my once-beautiful amber curls. The room swam in front of my eyes before I collapsed, exhausted, against the cool stones.

I was unable to raise my head to relish My Lady's end but I heard enough: Her screams turned frenzied as she repeated her stories and spun new ones while Vladmir prowled after her stealthily. She accused and cursed and taunted, her presence splintering into shards of madness before us. Then, a heavy thud and an ululation eclipsed even the raging weather outside the tower, chilling me to my battered spine. I stiffened as best I could, preparing for her to return and exact my punishment.

She did not come.

I lifted my head wearily from the rug, blinking in confusion. Vladmir's long cloak swirled in front of me and I heard the unused hearth burst to life. I was collected against a frigid body and swathed in black cloth, my head tipping back as I fell faint at the rapid movements. Deliverance from the nightmare was at hand.

"Sweet Esme…" Vladmir murmured against my throat. "You will be resplendent."

As the bite came, I was afforded one last and redemptive human vision: The Countess Bathory's head, her face frozen in imperious anger, was impaled on the iron hearthgrate, swathed in flames.

Charred release razed my tender veins.

Rebirth in the arms of Vladmir, my Sire.

Now, with my ecstatic tangy release under Edouard's flicking fingers, his pursed and kissing mouth, his daubs against my nipples and between my legs, a purr bubbled from deep within that place I'd known, _that one home made of Vladimir and Stefan._

_Home._

_Edouard._

_He would belong to me._

Relaxing down to the ground, my enlivened eyes trolled over his prestigious stance. We'd crashed, crossed, and combated one another.

Would we let go our equal condescension? Would we love?

Putting my gown back to rights, I stood and stayed my prince with a shove to his chest, "No. Not yet. You're not ready."

"Do I know you, Esmerelda?" his eyes questioned me, their dark sylvan greenery wondering.

I merely nodded. "Come to me, tomorrow, at your _Nyári ház._"

One moment longer in his seductive presence and I would have him too quickly, too hard. His blood would leave his body in a vibrant fountain beneath my lips, an ocean inside my throat.

He'd never recover.

I couldn't even look back, but I heard his plea to his god, and his pledge to me.

**  
**_**Budai Vár, **__**Nyári ház**_**  
Buda Castle, Summerhouse**

Edouard arrived alone, as promised, just before sunset. I watched from the cover of the surrounding beech woods of Sváb-Hill, feasting on the sight of him astride his white Lippexan stallion: the twin plumes of their breath freezing in the January air, the shift of his thighs against his snow-colored breeches as he swung from the saddle. His russet hair and cerulean great coat and caplet were all that colored the tundran landscape I'd lured him to. All else was gray death under a glittering moonlight skin, much as I was – and am. Fixed about one regal shoulder was the finished lynx pelt I offered him just days before. My chin rose with pride in the knowledge he wanted it displayed upon his person as a smile played at my lips. I was thrilled with the sight of this man adorned in my primitive tribute.

I took a moment to let the rush of pleasure pass. This night I would require my sharpest faculties and petty adoration would be of no assistance.

After a time, as the sky turned flaming vermillion, I made my own way to the door, soundlessly crossing the cold, crunching threshold. He stood at the barren hearth, tracing the ornate limestone surround under its icy confines.

He felt the surge of my presence and resignedly pronounced, "_Ma cousine_Antoinette summered with us once when I was a child. This summerhouse was built for her amusement."

The gloriette was coated in the heavy dressage of winter's rime, each ornate detail etched in flakes of frost. Above us, the rococo ceiling and grand chandelier trickled heavy with inverted frostbitten obelisks. Every pane of glass was shot with cross-hatched ice, obscuring the bitter landscape outside.

"You came," he said, amid his own reverie, monotone and still intent on the carved stone.

"As I said I would, Edouard." Once again, I refused to stand on ceremony, and why should I? He was my familiar, my mate, my chosen one.

He inhaled and turned to me, snapping his black booted heels with military precision. His eyes were ablaze with jade fire sparkling from the princely cameo of his handsome face, both youthful and cynical.

"And you persist with your insolence, _madam_."

I waved his imperious demand away with a slight sweep of my hand, laughing softly at his peacock-like posturing. "I've said this to you before, arrogant boy. I am older than your title; I have no use for formalities." I leveled a harder, intentioned gaze toward him and the mirth in my voice ebbed, "We meet as man and woman."

Our eyes met in challenge. Suddenly his stance softened and he cast his look downward.

"Yes, I suppose we do." His response was quiet, thoughtful. The recurring eruptions of his arrogance were so easy to dispel now that I knew the truth of him. Most likely he knew the truth of me as well.

_How could he not, having viewed me at my most primal while feeding from the lynx?_

"I appreciate you coming such a distance from the city," his discomfort was apparent when divested of his privileged Grand Duke persona. Just a boy who'd been indulged too much, experienced things most men lacked even the ability to dream of. "I didn't hear a sled…"

"No." I replied, offhandedly. Apparently there were niceties to address before I would be attended to. "I walked."

"Such a long way," he said, his eyes fixed on me again as he moved in an impressive human attempt at stealth to the delicately arched doorway.

"The distance is of no concern." I shrugged as I countered his move.

"But the cold..." he challenged, still attempting to construct a tidy answer to his questions when the simplest of explanations had already been given him the day of the hunt.

"Now it is cold, soon it will be warm. These trifles do not trouble me."

We stood for a time, silently appraising each other. As the sun slipped through the hoary-etched windows, the glacial surfaces of the summerhouse glittered in intense golden light. Edouard's heavy brows lifted, his mouth gaped. "You…" he stammered, unable to put words to what he saw before him as his final logical arguments fell aside.

"Yes, Edouard?" I slipped my cloak from my shoulders, allowing the blaze of orange red shafts from dying sunlight to turn me a-glimmering fire.

"Not of this Earth…"

"No. Very much of this Earth. Closer to it, I should think, than even your kind."

"My kind? _What_…Esme?"

"Destruction and rebirth." I stepped towards him, cast my bonnet aside and let my hair tumble free. "Your destruction is almost complete, Edouard. Would you be born again as man? As a mate?"

"I…" Stiffening his spine with practiced detachment, he attempted to assume his usual haughty countenance. "Certainly…I am expected… an appropriate marriage…" Twirling fog betrayed his rapid breaths, fear spurred Edouard but he was too far under my thrall to make a play for sanctuary.

As if that were even possible now. The black queen was in play: Endgame was at hand.

Lifting my arms with a practiced libidinal grace intended to mesmerize, I found the laces of my dress and pulled gently at them. Layers of spring pea organdy fluttered away from my body, the diaphanous silk rustling in collapse as it puddled at my olive, velvet slippers. I'd no chemise underneath, no small clothes. My Baltic ocher eyes, inviting yet still calculating, lifted to his own orbs, which today were the color of oak-ringed moss. A woman's sigh escaped my satiny lips, contrasting the timid little peeps of court ingénues usually bustling about him. His sharp brows and the husky report of his own exhalation betrayed him and he quickly closed the breach between us with his feline advance.

He lifted me easily and within a few of his powerful strides, he propelled me into the thin wall, shaking innumerable shards of ice free from the crystal sconces and delicate millwork that lined the summerhouse's ruined walls. With one last attempt to assert his power, he ground his mouth against mine, shoving his tongue roughly past my razor-edged teeth to plunge against mine. The tyrannical assault brought more than his fevered kiss: his tongue was slightly injured and bled, just enough to entice. I drew against it delicately, arching my back as I pulled him roughly against me. His arms tightened about my waist, even as his body tensed and attempted to pull away from me.

His taste was incomparable. My thirst burned, warring with my plan to mate with Edouard in body and blood. I summoned my resolve to change him, battling the insistences from the truly damned creature I was to drain him completely without delay. I tossed him from me and he crashed into the ice-flocked harpsichord, driving it hard against the wall with his progression. The entire structure seemed to sway from the collision. Above us, the weakened plaster groaned and split in crazed furrows, sending huge pieces of the ceiling crashing to the floor. Above our heads, the massive chandelier lurched precariously, weighted under thousands of stalactites; its affixed point nothing more than rotting lathe under the neglected decoration.

Edouard noted none of it; possibly the sounds of destruction I heard so clearly were in truth no more than whispers and moans. His eyes had hardened the dull green of agate, and his jaw worked angrily as he sneered at me.

Unchecked fury radiated from him as he stepped towards me, his mouth beginning to form words of outrage. All of this – the rain of plaster, the groans of the threatening glass overhead, even my chosen-one's livid approach – happened in mere seconds. Just as the ice-ensconced chandelier began its descent to the marble floor, he stepped into its path. I hurled him aside seconds before the exquisite crystal crashed to the marble floor. My skin repelled the shards of glass easily, with any luck he had turned his back to the calamity for his body covered in tiny lacerations would have me undone.

He turned, visibly shaken, and I sighed heavily in relief. No blood, save a tiny rivulet from his mouth from his own incensed kissing.

I strode to him purposefully, prepared to slap him like a preening girl if I must to undo the shock from the near catastrophe. He looked to me, swallowing heavily, and exhaled.

"Esme. You've saved my life, _az ém kicsi kedves._" He said in a hush, endearing me in words for the first time. _His little one._

I steeled myself against his suddenly gentle affection and dismissed the sweet, boyish, open smile on his handsome face. His youth, true naiveté, and arrogant exuberance could not sway me. I would not falter due to sentiment.

Edouard's hand reached for one of my breasts, his long finger brushing softly at a mauve nipple.

"So cold…" he murmured, marveling and taking another step towards me.

"And soon you shall be quite warm, _az en_ _férj szerető_. There will be no negotiations by your father's ministers, no approval needed from Vienna or Rome. I have no fealty to them. I've chosen. _Az én válogatott egy_, you Edouard, are mine; you are my chosen one."

He blinked heavily, almost losing consciousness, it seemed, under the tripled forces of my saving him, the glow of my body before him, and my dismissal of the human expectations he'd been bound to by birth.

"Now, _az én férj szerető. _My husband-lover, it is time."

Even as his arms circled about me, cupping my round bottom with one hand and catching my hair with the other, he struggled intellectually with his body's need. His scent drew me further into our evening's revelry, my mouth pooling heavily with the same venom that slicked the valley between my legs. With a short snap of my head, the first wound opened on the plush velveteen of his lower lip and I pulled delicately at the weeping red nectar, steeling myself for what lie ahead even as hunger set my need raging.

"Now, taste me, _a babája_. Kneel before your woman," I commanded.

Edouard fell before me – _finally_ – and seized me crudely, rubbing his face across my thighs and the cinnamon hair between them, leaving the mark of his blood on my pale thighs as testament to his embrace. A ragged sigh passed his lips as he inhaled the musk of his ruin; his breath suspended in the frigid air and rose dense as the mist from the Danube. He kissed me there like he would embrace my lips, his tongue darting and sliding inside as he leant back with me balanced atop his mouth. I steadied myself lightly against his broad shoulders and allowed myself a momentary loss of control as I descended into the sensation of his tongue pleasuring me.

"Enough," I called out, even as I shuddered against his nibbling mouth. It was impossible to give over to him, governance was essential if I were to take up such an enterprise as what laid before me. The scent of his blood, now thrumming with a thousand starling's wings, drew me on. Struggling for control, I pushed against his shoulders, shoving him away as my body stiffened in protest.

"Breeches, Edouard. Now."

Slowly, he stood as commanded, never turning his verdant gaze from me, and released the buttons at the waist of his finely tailored trousers, taunting me with his measured movements.

I pressed against his arms none too gentlyin my waking frenzy. He collapsed awkwardly on the harpsichord's keys, sending up plumes of dislodged crystallized snowflakes with the snapping strings and discordant sounds. Instantly I was before him, on the floor, obsequious, taking his rigid length in my mouth. Edouard moaned savagely as I guided him between my poisonous glistening teeth again and again, pausing only to twirl about the flushed and swollen head with my arctic tongue. Sagging against the ruined instrument, he gave over finally to my designs for him with throaty gasps and groans. I cupped the supple flesh around his pulsing cock, kneading, pulling, coaxing him to the apex of his release. The ropey muscles of his thighs tensed as he struggled to stay upright and in command.

Just under the tawny whorls of rasping hair that wreathed his loins, a vein beckoned to me, its pulse thrumming hard against the delicate wall of his pitching and rolling abdomen. With a flick of my wrist I pierced him and lowered my mouth to the bloom of thick winey liquid as I worked him with my other hand. His blood filled my mouth and I nearly swooned against his slim hips…_so delicious, so salty! _ Liquid shot from the gaping wound down my throat in a precise imitation of the way I imagined his seed would follow. I lapped at the hot fluid, then shook my head in delirium remembering the task at hand. Exerting every bit of will I could claim, I drove my venom inside him, prodding with my tongue again and again. As I filled him with my own juices, I wound my hand around his stones, pulling gently.

He grunted with pleasure at my hard use of his body, his arousal building as the pain he endured from my attentions increased. "Esme…please, don't toy with me any longer. I need to be inside you, _Saját királyné."_

I guided him to the floor while his entire body quivered with effort of his wanted to climax inside me as I stole the last vestiges of his human life. Lowering myself astride him, I belted backwards at the feel of him sliding smoothly into my glossy cavern, his hips hitching up to propel that soldering cock deeper within.

**  
**His titles would be shredded one ruined noble family at a time. His arrogance justly deserved, I soothed dangerously, my hips rotating around his rigid length, widening my thighs and rubbing up and down his chest with the bared ampleness of my breasts. Betwixt moans and sighs that ran as deep as his shaft inside of me, my kiss was of passion, witchery, and immortality, "I will make you a King, my lord, _my Edouard_."

Tortured by lust, the beautiful man writhed beneath me, striving with more and more force into the wet wonder between my legs. He threaded in and out, his full cock arresting me with each lunge, inciting me with every exit. My vision clouded with hungers of both body and bloody feasting.

Edouard thrashed in orgasm and death.

Our cries echoed against the ruined walls of our frozen bridal chamber. He pulsed searing streams into me and I fell against his chest, weak with my own erupting climax. _Weak. _ Guided by his scent, I found the vital vein in his neck and plunged against it, drinking greedily, offering my own venom in exchange for his sweet liquid. An agonized scream broke free from his heaving chest and he pressed me against him violently, his body bucking against me as the calamitous venom coursed through him to reignite the fire of his transfiguration.

Edouard stilled then, his fevered brow nestling into the curve of my neck. I murmured soothing sounds against the burnished strands of his hair, clutching his soon-to-be ravaged body to mine.

"Love, husband, consort…" I whispered against his simmering skin, scattering little kisses towards his forehead glistening with perspiration.

_"Ön nem 'RE tigresse." _He replied, delirious and hoarse with the malady I was causing him._ "Ön nem egy állat. Ön 'RE egy asszony. Én nő. Saját királyné! "_

"You are no tigresse."

"You are not an animal."

"You're a woman."

"My woman."

"My Queen."

_~Fin~_

Damn! That feels good!

~Were you surprised, scandalized, titillated, horrified? Review?~

Thanks to Vanessarae and blondie aka robin!

My total love, all the time (like right down to the wee wee hours of the morning, when laughter turns to howls and tears and total silliness…) to winterstale. Woman you are so much the shit! I love and respect you.


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